Custom Machine Types

Create Compute Engine VMs with optimal amounts of vCPU and memory

Tailor Your Compute Engine Instances

Custom Machine Types is a feature of Google Compute Engine that lets you easily create a machine type customized to your needs. With Custom Machine Types, you can create virtual machines with the optimal amount of CPU and memory for your workloads. Create a machine type with as little as 1 vCPU and up to 64 vCPUs, or any even number of vCPUs in between. You can configure up to 6.5 GB of memory per vCPU.

Tailored, Configurable Infrastructure

By offering Custom Machine Types and predefined machine types, Compute Engine allows you to tailor your infrastructure to your workload. And you aren’t locked in to your choice. Compute Engine’s stop/start feature allows you move your workload to a smaller or larger Custom Machine Type instance, or to a predefined configuration.

Find Your Optimal Pricing

Custom Machine Types are priced by the resources they use (i.e. vCPU, memory). You can predictably calculate the cost of Custom Machine Type shapes in any configuration. Optimize your Compute Engine pricing by adding or subtracting resources above or below the next pre-defined machine type. For some use cases, you could save 50% or more compared to predefined types at other public cloud providers by configuring an optimal machine for your workload on Google Cloud Platform.

Enable It Instantly

Create VMs with Custom Machine Types using the Compute Engine UI, a simple gcloud Command Line invocation, or the API.

For batch jobs and other fault-tolerant workloads, you can customize and save more by making your custom machines Preemptible VMs.

“
The true value of cloud is realized when customers can scale their workloads horizontally and vertically. Custom machine types put the control in the hands of customers by letting them choose what they need.
”

- Forbes magazine

Custom Machine Types Pricing

Custom Machine Types are billed per vCPUs memory provisioned to each instance. The US rates for Custom Machine Types are as follows:

Sustained Use Discounts

Compute Engine calculates Custom Machine Type sustained use discounts based on vCPU and memory usage, and applies the discounts described by the sustained usage discount table.

Preemptible Custom Machine Types

Preemptible VMs can save you up to 80% on Compute Engine costs for batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads. You can combine preemptibility with Custom Machine Types.

How much could you save with Custom Machine Types?

Let’s say you are running a web server on a cloud provider that offers pre-defined virtual machines with 2 vCPUs and 7.5GB of RAM and — for twice the cost — 4 vCPUs and 15GB of RAM. If your website would run best on VMs with 4 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM, you could create Custom Machine Types on Compute Engine and save 33% over your previous provider. You would also get the benefits of running your website on Google, such as automatic sustained use discounts, which can help you save 53% over your previous provider.